Canadian nurses working at Michigan hospitals were shocked last week when border security officers stopped them from entering the U.S. because of changes to their working visas under new immigration policies.
Staff at Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital heard reports of nurses unable to renew their working visas. Last week, a new Canadian hire at Henry Ford tried to go to work, but was turned away at the Windsor-Detroit border.
Source: CBC

President Trump’s Defense secretary, James Mattis, believes climate change is a national security threat, according to congressional testimony highlighted by ProPublica on Tuesday.
According to a report, Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he believes in climate change and recognizes it as a threat. The statement came in unpublished written testimony associated with Mattis’s confirmation hearing.
Source: The Hill

Less than a month after complaining that reporters “make up stories and make up sources,” President Donald Trump is now depending on favorable coverage that use an anonymous source — namely, himself.
Prior to his joint address to Congress on Tuesday, the president used a private meeting with national news anchors to speak off the record as a “senior administration official,” according to BuzzFeed. “There’s got to be a coming together,” Trump told the reporters on background, specifically on issues like immigration reform. Some of his comments were later put back on the record on Tuesday eve...

President Trump declared Tuesday that a “new chapter of American greatness is now beginning” as he made economic revival the centerpiece of his first address to Congress – issuing a clarion call to “restart the engine of the American economy” through tax cuts, better trade deals, immigration enforcement and a $1 trillion infrastructure program.
He also called on Congress to replace what he called the “imploding ObamaCare disaster” with legislation that lowers costs and expands access, an ambitious goal for GOP lawmakers still trying to come together on a plan.
Source: Fox News

In an interview with Fox News that aired Tuesday morning, Trump said the mission “was started before I got here.”
He noted that the operation was something his generals “were looking at for a long time doing.”
“This was something that was, you know, just — they wanted to do,” Trump said. “ And they came to see me and they explained what they wanted to do, the generals, who are very respected.”
“And they lost Ryan,” Trump continued.
Source: Washington Post

Donald Trump has accused former president Barack Obama and his “people” of organizing the demonstrations that have roiled city streets, airports and town halls during the first weeks of his presidency.
In an interview with Fox and Friends, which aired on Tuesday morning in the US, the president also suggested Obama and his allies were behind the leaks of classified information from the White House to the press.
Source: The Guardian

Donald Trump is moving forward with his plans to axe the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities (which partially funds NPR and PBS), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other programs as he looks to prune public spending.
The White House budget office has drafted a “hit list” of programs, according to The New York Times, all of which cost under $500 million a year to run. In fact, they total approximately $2.5 billion - just 0.0625% of the projected $4 trillion budget.
Source: The Independent

Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly has signed sweeping new guidelines that empower federal authorities to more aggressively detain and deport illegal immigrants inside the United States and at the border.
In a pair of memos, Kelly offered more detail on plans for the agency to hire thousands of additional enforcement agents, expand the pool of immigrants who are prioritized for removal, speed up deportation hearings and enlist local law enforcement to help make arrests.
Source: Washington Post

Since January 2015, the FBI has also arrested more anti-immigrant American citizens plotting violent attacks on Muslims within the U.S. than it has refugees, or former refugees, from any banned country. As we wrote about here, here and here, in October 2016, three white men from Kansas were charged with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction. According to the graphic complaint, the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant men planned to attack a mosque in the area. The men progressed quickly with their plot, amassing firearms and explosives. The targets were people from Somalia, who ironically, ...

President Trump met Tuesday morning with a group of sheriffs from the National Sheriffs Association, a group that consists of more than 3,000 sheriffs from around the country. And to this sworn group of law enforcement veterans, with reporters taking notes, he again repeated a falsehood about the murder rate in America.
Trump told the sheriffs, “the murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years.” He blamed the news media for not publicizing this development, then added, “But the murder rate is the highest it’s been in, I guess, 45 to 47 years.”
The country’s murder rat...